Ramp taps AI as fintech hunts for growth | TechCrunch

AI can help customers, but can it help the bottom line?

An increasing number of fintechs claim to be using artificial intelligence to get ahead. Just how many of them are truly using the technology to improve the experience for their customers, however, is less clear.

In the spend management space in particular, two of the largest players, Ramp and Brex, have been vocal about how they believe AI will transform the way they operate and serve their customers.

Ramp announced on Wednesday a new integration with Copilot, Microsoft’s brand of generative AI technologies. Ramp says its plug-in with Copilot for Microsoft 365 means businesses don’t have to bounce between multiple tools and applications to gather spend insights or set up advanced controls. Microsoft 365 is Redmond’s subscription productivity suite.

“Now, they can use natural language to access Ramp’s smart AI assistant from their workspace and get the most advanced work done faster,” said Ramp CEO and co-founder Eric Glyman.

Users will be able to do things like issue new cards directly within Teams or set up and receive real-time alerts on employee transactions.

The company also announced a number of new features around extending Ramp’s capabilities to not just read queries, but to write answers and take the appropriate action, in context, based on the customer’s data.

This includes interacting with Ramp as a conversational agent. For example, according to Glyman, if a manager is chatting with a finance admin about raising the spend limit for their employee’s upcoming travel, the finance admin can tag the Ramp agent into the conversation, ask the bot to raise the spend limit to the specified amount.

Investing more in AI

Both Brex and Ramp claim to have been leveraging AI in various ways for some time.

Brex in particular said it has been using AI since inception across underwriting, fraud, receipt matching and merchant categorization, among other product areas. But it’s dialed up its AI investments over the past year, particularly in customer-facing scenarios.